I used to work in mortgages and I was twice as productive re output as everyone else. I asked if I could just do the average workers output, leave and go stay home at lunchtime, they said no.

Certain jobs and certain people are better suited to WFH than others. Professional services (accountancy, law, various types of consultancy etc) have been using hybrid models for the last 20 years or so. They recruit very specific types of people and pay them well.

I started my company by working from home myself and hiring 4 other people to WFH for me. I didn't have an office to start with.

Experience tells me that maybe 1 in 7 have the right personality traits to WFH for extended periods and as the company has grown and the recruitment process become more formalised, psychological testing has become a standard part of the process.

You need goal oriented individuals. PWC, Accenture, KPMG etc were the best at this in the early days, as they were all about having a delivery mentality and only hired people who were eager to produce results.

Most people, on the other hand, will do as little as management will let them get away with. These people belong in offices, as managing them remotely results in even worse productivity than when on site, due to communication lag.

If you want to see a practical example, try dealing with any local government department since covid and it takes twice as long to get anything done, due to them being WFH and not answering phones/mails.

They can't find people to fill the needed spots that have already been created by the drop in productivity, let alone if they start sacking people. Also, onboarding for an insurance adjuster is almost a year. It's not a simple job. And training it remote has almost doubled their training times.

Funny thing about goals… people tend to set and achieve ambitious goals when they truly believe they will get meaningful rewards for doing so.

Not pizza parties or casual dress days but things like money, promotions, professional development opportunities, etc

If measured productivity has dropped why have those individuals not been sacked?

Isn’t that one of the jobs of management?

Why do you sound like you have management positions?

What do you mean they can’t find people? Did we suddenly run out of people? Of course not there’s loads of people.

What they actually mean is, they can’t attract people because the pay is crap and they expect people to fight traffic for an hour each way for no good reason.

If their management is that dumb they deserve to fail.

What the hell kind of supervisor measures productivity by hours worked???

Way entirely too many
When I was doing consulting this was the #1 issue many of them had

Even worse I’ve heard of many large firms making policies e.g. “you must be in the office a minimum of X days”

Like, it’s not even about the number of hours worked, butwhere you work those hours.

Yet if you ask them how they’re measuring actual performance - mission-critical outputs - you’ll get blank stares.

I do love all the conspiracy theories that CEOs are big braining a purposeful unemployment decrease by requiring workers to be in office

Then when you actually work with CEOs you realize that the majority of them just have absolutely no idea what is going on and have basically been running on the wings of the Ops managers

Funny thing about goals… people tend to set and achieve ambitious goals when they truly believe they will get meaningful rewards for doing so.

Not pizza parties or casual dress days but things like money, promotions, professional development opportunities, etc

No longer a conspiracy theory. They're doing it in a different way now. They say your jobs are being eliminated. You can either retrain in a job that typically pays less and/or move for the job. Or you're gone. Happened to a local guy and his IT team. So they all retired. Exactly what the company wanted. Got rid of some boomer bloat on payroll. They didn't have to fire them or provide severance.

I’m not even aware of anyone in any industry who measures productivity by hours worked. I think you’re making that up.

Could it be that some people require on-site supervision in order to perform, regardless of the manager? Do you envision the possibility that an employee may try to steal time, or shirk responsibility, or take advantage of working from home?

Yeah, I worded that oddly
I do think a purposeful unemployment rise is happening, but I also don't think the majority of the CEOs running things are plotting this 5d Chess strategy minus the really large companies out there
From my experience, most of the CEOs who started mass layoffs were putting all of their eggs in the basket of one or two stand out employees and assuming they could just cut the rest
Then those employees would get burnt out and move on and you'd end up with the "Nobody wants to work anymore" post on the company ******** page
Construction seemed to be the worst. Those CEOs seemed so far removed from their employees every day that they would just cut critical things because they didn't know what it did

There was a LOT that I learned doing consulting about different C-Suite execs and their thought processes. Some were absolutely as manipulative and cutthroat as many believe, but a lot were just complete idiots and I will never know how they got there to begin with